I realize that haven't posted for more than a year and maybe this will signal an end to my silence, plus maybe prompt me to post some kind of explanation, but I thought the following links were too good not to share.

As you've probably noticed, the whole world is in a state of turmoil because to quote John McCain, "the economy is about to crater".

I've seen a few folks on my friendlist wonder about this and/or offer their opinions over the past couple of weeks, so when I learned about an easy-to-understand explanation of the problem which was put together for NPR's "This American Life", back in May, I thought it was too important not to pass along.

Streaming Audio
Transcript

ETA: The audio version is 59 minutes and the transcript is 20 pages, so if you're one of those on-the-go kind of folks, there's also a paid download available on the program's archive. (#355, May '08)

Charlie Rose is playing the other room and it's his repeat of Friday's tribute to New York Socialite Brooke Astor, who died last week. As I'm listening, I was initially reminded of my post from last January about her family and thus far, I haven't heard much of anything about the controversy which was such a large part of her final years and my blog entry, so I thought I'd offer a link.

PS) If anyone decides to visit Mr. Rose's site and if they're feeling particularly geeky or fearful, his recent hour about preparing for and protecting ourselves against a global pandemic is pretty dry, yet incredibly interesting.

We've been cleaning the house, so I flipped on WERU out of Blue Hill, Maine for the tailend of their world music show and their Sunday afternoon, music and commentary program called "Women's Voices.

One of the songs jumped out at me, so I moved over to the computer, when the DJ was going through the playlist of songs that we had just heard. Unfortunately, I can't find a full-length copy of Christine Lavin's "Happydance", the title track from her new album "Happy Dance of the Xenophobe", but I did find that it may have been previously called "Quit Your Sobbing - She's an Idiot".

Nonetheless, if you've got a couple of minutes and would like a taste of this song and the other fun, bouncy tunes on her new album, I suggest playing through its Amazon Sampler and perhaps viewing a live, festival performance of what may be an older song, "Sensitive New Age Guys".

If you go to the supermarket, you can't miss the many stories about Britney Spears and her custody battle with Kevin Federline.

I don't know the facts of her life, but if you look around the headlines and actually look at the photographs, you see what appears to be a fairly normal family. And, if you bother to read the stories (click the mags), you'll find that a lot of the accusations are that she prefers for the nannies to change the kid's diapers and to see them to bed; she's sometimes naked in front of the kids; some of the staff, whom she considers to be her friends have seen her undressed; she drinks and takes a prescription medication.

None of those things are really outlandish and other than the time, when she nudged a car in a parking garage recently, almost all of the stories are coming from unnamed sources and they always appear in an article surrounded by quotes from his lawyer.

Well, we all know how unnamed sources or senior White House officials sometimes go.

I don't know if she's a normal, single mother, who is worth about $120m and isolated from society by the paparazzi or a trainwreck, nor do I know if she's going to keep living in the limelight or eventually head back to Louisiana. All I know is what I see and among those things that I have seen over the years have been stories about the occasional millionaire's ex-spouse collecting tens of thousands in monthly child support, so I have to take all of the Britney character assassination with a grain of salt.

The founder and CEO of blogsearch Technorati has announced that he's stepping down from his executive position and installing a team of the company's Vice Presidents to serve as President. In his post explaining the move, Mr. Sifrey notes that their search for a replacement CEO has taken longer than anticipated, while others have noted that Technorati has benefited from several influxes of cash and may be headed toward oblivion because latecomer Google has been eating their shorts with a less functional tool.

I've long held that from the outside, Technorati looks like a good acquisition target for Yahoo! because it matches a lot of the criteria they've used in the past and a simple implementation of contextual advertising could be what the doctor ordered. Though I can speak only for myself, but I'd say that one of the big reasons that Technorati's widgets don't litter the web is because there's no back end from the results. Sure, Google hasn't offered an embeddable blogsearch and you're just left with their plain vanilla service, but if you use it or their "search within this site" functionality, the possibility does exist for you to monetize the results with AdSense.

Of course, Yahoo! is also in the business of contextual ads, plus their blogsearch tool was only available for a while and then it disappeared, or at least I can no longer find it. Nonetheless, it wouldn't take much for them to marry advertising to the Technorati widgets, but they have their own problems at this time and though I still think they should consider the purchase, if somebody were to ask me the solution to Yahoo!'s woes, the acquisition of Technorati would be the somewhere around third on my list.

It's still a good idea and the price is obviously ticking down, but since Mr. Sifrey made his announcement another scenario has popped into my head and because they aren't plagued by an infernal internal memo, it may actually be a more realistic option.

( My Suggestion )

The following was uploaded to YouTube with the simple title "Women in Film", but for the purposes of this post, I'm going to retitle it "The Face of Beauty?". (question mark intended and it looks great fullscreen)

(via Jezebel)

I was fishing through Fox News the other evening, when I ran across a video titled "Post Porn Effect" and because it obviously discusses one of the topics that I've blogged about in the past, I clicked to view.

If pressed, I can say that I may agree with some of the stuff spouted by "Sexologist" Yvonne Fulbright, but I don't believe all or possibly most of it by any means and the following quotes jumped out at me, as being worthy of note;

Up until today, we've seen people with a warped sense of their sexuality because a Puritanical background. Twenty years from now, it'll be because we're a porn-obsessed culture that really is perverse in the way that we're handling what it means to be sexually healthy.

And a few seconds later, Ms. Fulbright declares;

Women especially have such a warped sense of what it means to be sexually liberated and empowered; they're disconnected from their bodies and they're not really sure what true sexual pleasuring means in this day and age.

Apparently, if you're a "sexologist", you're also qualified to be a "futurologist" and to speak for all women, plus if you watch the thing through to its conclusion, she presents herself as an expert on the value of social networking.

Warning: The 3:36 clip uses thirty seconds from a Girls Gone Wild infomercial as b-roll.

Please Note: I have no idea about some of these things and some scare me, but the expo does appear equal opportunity.
                        Obviously, this video (which trails-off toward the end) is not safe for work.

Earlier, I made mention of a new "feature" from Google which would allow whomever they decide is the subject of a news story to post a response, which would be hosted by Google and posted alongside their link to the original story.

The context of my post was that it was another example of Google releasing a "feature" which has no revenue stream, but then during the afternoon, I ran across a post on TechCrunch highlighting that Google News does not allow spiders to crawl their site and that they own the rights to everything which isn't from another news source.

So, in effect, the NYTimes can write a piece, Google can scrape it from the NYTimes site, one of the subjects can write a response which Google will host and nobody, including the Times will be allowed to reprint it or make a derivative work.

When Yahoo! hit the IPO jackpot, they invested a lot of the extra cashflow into other standalone, web startups and as a result, they took a big hit when the bubble burst. The Google IPO has created a lot more liquidity for the younger search company, but they seem to be putting an inordinate amount of their money and effort into questionable in-house ventures which appear to only enhance the brand and which do not provide obvious income opportunities.

Over the past week, two such endeavors have come to light;

• Yesterday, Google announced that the subjects of a news story may now submit a written response and after the author's authenticity is verified, the response will be posted alongside the original story using AJAX, so a new pageview would not be required and no additional advertising would be displayed.
  
  An example of this setup can be found in relation to a story about McDonalds.



• On Monday, Google announced that they'll be recruiting "Business Referral Representatives", who will be independent contractors that will be paid per verified listing for going to local businesses to collect data like phone number and hours of operation, plus take a photo of the business so that this information could be added to Google Maps.
  
  While in contact with these businesses, the contractors, who could be anyone and anywhere are encouraged to talk-up the functionality of Google Maps and Adwords. Though, none of their pay is tied to the contracting for these services. The only way Google would make a return for this effort is if the business were to purchase Adwords and in my opinion, they may get some sales in markets larger than a hundred thousand, but in the smaller cities of this country, Adwords doesn't seem to make a lot of sense for the average brick and mortar business.
  
  For example, if you punch the name of my town, the postal abbreviation for the state and the word "hardware" into Google, the first three listings are from Google: Local. All three of these businesses belong to a national buying cooperative and their phone number and map position are already displayed.
  
  There's the "Ace", the "True Value" and a "Do It Best"; Two of the three do have freestanding websites which lists the kind of data that Google will be collecting, but they're already linked from the initial listing and an additional link to such a limited site would just be redundant. For shopping, specials or price comparisons, all of the businesses redirect to the national chains where the catalog is more extensive and the database is easier to maintain.
  
  If I were the owner of any of these businesses, I don't see how I could justify buying an Adword. My listing already appears at the top of the Google results and though a geographically-targeted Adword would put another link on the page, I don't see how it would benefit me. There's three hardware stores in this town, much like there's three auto parts stores and two laundries. This situation and these numbers are fairly typical for the smaller markets, so why should Google pay somebody up to ten dollars to collect their phone numbers, which are already in Google anyway because of their lookup service?

As a user, I may get some benefit from these efforts, but the hosted responses to news articles raises legal, ethical and competitive questions. I pretty much know what my local hardware stores look like and where they're located, so since the phone numbers are already listed and their hours are a click away, I can't see any value in the second effort for anyone in a small to mid-sized market.

If I were an investor in Google, it may be time to start questioning the reasoning for these and other ventures because I see only limited return, beyond a simple and non-revenue-producing enhancement of the brand.

Though, if I were unemployed and in need of an income, I'd totally bank some of Google's misguided funds.

(Valleywag and Lost Remote contributed links to this post)

Chapter 207: Section 1. Marriage of man to certain relatives

No man shall marry his mother, grandmother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, stepmother, grandfather's wife, grandson's wife, wife's mother, wife's grandmother, wife's daughter, wife's granddaughter, brother's daughter, sister's daughter, father's sister or mother's sister.

Chapter 207: Section 2. Marriage of woman to certain relatives

No woman shall marry her father, grandfather, son, grandson, brother, stepfather, grandmother's husband, daughter's husband, granddaughter's husband, husband's grandfather, husband's son, husband's grandson, brother's son, sister's son, father's brother or mother's brother.

Chapter 207: Section 3. Application of Secs. 1 and 2

The prohibition of the two preceding sections shall continue notwithstanding the dissolution, by death or divorce, of the marriage by which the affinity was created, unless the divorce was granted because such marriage was originally unlawful or void.

At first glance, one might wonder why such an explicit list and why they didn't use common titles like "Aunt" and "Uncle". Though, once you delve beneath the surface and load the lists into a spreadsheet to make sure: You're left asking why a man can marry his son's wife and a woman can marry her husband's father, but a similar union is forbidden, the other way around?

Citation

What's the deal with young women wearing spaghetti straps and two bras? Are the visible tri-colors the style? Do they need the extra padding or is their "best" bra wore out, so they put another one underneath? Sure, it might be understandable, if you could see their layered undergarments from the front, but the best I can tell, they're doing it for the straps.

What ever happened to burning the things? In the 1970s, they passed a law in NC making it illegal for women to ride motorcycles topless. Will so many girls wearing two, completely makeup for all those who went without? Are they purposefully trying to counteract their ancestors? Why must you look through a tangled weave of elastic to admire a lovely set of shoulders, nowadays?

I'm sure that I've hinted about it before, but there was a time that I'd tell receptionists or someone whom I didn't think really needed my name that I was either Peter Fonda, Phillip Michael Thomas or Anwar Sadat depending on my mood. Now as I've gotten older, my son's favorite movie for the past couple of months has been Thomas and the Magic Railroad with Alec Baldwin and Peter Fonda.

Of course there's nothing wrong with the flick, but we have so much Thomas and part of me wishes that he'd occasionally want to see something from one of the disks narrated by George Carlin or Ringo Starr. Carlin's work is pretty straight, so I just long for it to have something different in the background, while Ringo apparently did the first season, when "Mr. Conductor" was called "The Fat Conductor" and according to my daughter, there's a storyline in which one of the engines narrowly escapes "sudden death".

IOW: It's after 1AM and my boy is showing no sign of going to sleep. Right now, he's got a couple of chairs lined-up and he's climbing back and forth from me to the other end, while Mr. Fonda is letting "Lady" loose in the other room.

Oh, and "Baby Elmo" is getting carried along, so he keeps whining and asking for a bottle.

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I'm not going to name him up-top because he would find it via a Google Blogsearch and then I'd be outed, but lately I've taken an inordinate amount of pleasure in teasing a Bubble 2.0 figure on his own blog. I don't know why. I've never met the guy and have nothing against him. In fact there's nothing really wrong with him making a living through writing and webcasting, it's just that something inside of me takes pleasure in publicly questioning the validity of his messages.

Though, now that others have joined-in and the chorus is getting louder, the exercise is beginning to lose some of its appeal.

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Earlier this evening, I flashed over to the website for Craig Ferguson's show because I couldn't remember the name of the musical act and her voice was still in my head. If you haven't heard Nellie McKay, I can certainly suggest that you watch somebody's copyright infringement of her Friday night appearance before it's jerked from YouTube.

Of course, she's that whole jazzy piano, retro sound that has been among my faves for a while and I'd say from this one performance, I'd compare her to Rickie Lee Jones. Though after I submit this post, I'm going to flip through some of her other YouTubes, so I'll have a better idea and I might possibly try to find a legal copy to burn for our car ride tomorrow.

BTW: While you're there, you may notice that CBS uploads portions of Craig's monologue-type things. If you go to his main website, you'll find that they produced a montage of Tom Snyder clips from when he hosted the show and because I missed it the first time, I'll also recommend that you watch Craig's "Show & Tell" from July 30th because as usual, he was hilarious.

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Because a lot of this post has been me repeating myself, I thought I'd point-out that American Express has now uploaded their "Members Project" commercial and another video featuring "Tim from the office next door". Now that I've seen both and have done some side-by-side comparisons, I'm pretty sure that my initial instinct was right and as I posted the other day, he's being played by David Alan Basche, whom I recognized from a crappy sitcom which I mostly watched due to Peter Bonerz's involvement.

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And finally; About once a month, I turn on the local country station and for some reason, the last couple of times, a novelty ballad has played during my short drive and though you may want to go back and wash your mind out with the Nellie McKay video or her newest Amazon Sampler afterward, the Good-Ole-Boy in me still gets a kick from the words to Billy Currington's song.